The Miva Blog

Every business constantly strives to grow their customer base; if it weren’t for the customers, the business wouldn’t exist, at least not for very long. It’s comparable to musicians - without their fans, they would be nothing. So naturally, business owners are always looking for new ways to stand out, to be different.

Today’s blog post was originally published on January 21st, 2010, and is our most popular to date. As a special gift to you, we are presenting the post again with a few extra updates. Enjoy, and don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comment space below the post. Happy New Year!

By definition, ecommerce or electronic commerce, is the buying and selling of products or services via the Internet. For many Americans, ecommerce is something we participate in on a daily basis, like online bill payment or purchasing from an e-tailer.

Nowadays the thought of living without ecommerce seems unfathomable, complicated and an inconvenience to many. It wasn’t until only a few decades ago that the idea of ecommerce had even appeared.

Ecommerce was introduced 40 years ago and, to this day, continues to grow with new technologies, innovations, and thousands of businesses entering the online market each year. The convenience, safety, and user experience of ecommerce has improved exponentially since its inception in the 1970’s. This article will address some of the key players and milestones of ecommerce.

When developing for a live store, often times that means editing, adding, and/or removing HTML, Javascript, MivaScript, etc. from the store’s page templates. That’s great and all, but sometimes you want to be able to see your work without affecting the live experience of the customers shopping on the site.

We’re going to show you how you can work on code in a live store while hiding your work from the public at large. To do this, you’re first going to need to create a customer account in the store. The idea is to get the code you’re working on to only show in run-time (the part of your store that the customers see) when you are viewing the page while logged in as YOUR customer account.

Did You Know…?You can show an MSRP price and your discounted price for any product.

Focus: Custom Product FieldsGoal: Show the full price of a product, cross it out, then show your lower price.Level: Beginner - New to Store Morph

If you run an online discount store, you may want to compare the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) to your discounted price. Or, if you put items on sale, you may want to show both the original price and the sale price.

This is easy to do in Miva Merchant 5. You simply create a custom product field for the higher price, and use the built-in price field for the lower price. Then you can edit the Page templates for the Product and Category pages (and maybe even the Search page) to show the higher price (with a strikethrough) next to the lower price.